The chemical and isotopic composition of foraminiferal shells (so-called proxies) reflects the physico-chemical properties of the seawater. In current day paleoclimate research, the reconstruction of past seawater carbonate system to infer atmospheric CO2 concentrations is one of the most pressing challenges and a variety of proxies have been investigated, such as foraminiferal U/Ca. Since in natural seawater and traditional CO2 perturbation experiments, the carbonate system parameters co-vary, it is not possible to determine the parameter of the carbonate system causing e.g. changes in U/Ca, complicating the use of the latter as a carbonate system proxy. We overcome this problem, by culturing the benthic foraminifer Ammonia sp. at a range of carbonate chemistry manipulation treatments. Shell U/Ca values were determined to test sensitivity of U incorporation to various parameters of the carbonate system. We argue that CO3 is the parameter affecting the U/Ca ratio and consequently, the partitioning coefficient for U in Ammonia sp DU. We can confirm the strong potential of foraminiferal U/Ca as a CO3 proxy.

In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Lavigne and Gattuso, 2011) was used to compute a complete and consistent set of carbonate system variables, as described by Nisumaa et al. (2010). In this dataset the original values were archived in addition with the recalculated parameters (see related PI).

Supplement to: Keul, Nina; Langer, Gerald; de Nooijer, Lennart Jan; Nehrke, Gernot; Reichart, Gert-Jan; Bijma, Jelle (2013): Incorporation of uranium in benthic foraminiferal calcite reflects seawater carbonate ion concentration. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 14(1), 102-111